The old forums didn’t allow users to delete their own posts, and I believe there valid are reasons for this behaviour. Take for example the abusive new user, who decides to mess with the community by creating a new post, waiting for 3-4 users to see it, then delete it. Then repeat this over and over. It would turn the community into a shambles.
The Flag option can be improved. Currently the text is “This post requires staff attention for another reason not listed above.”.
Perhaps this can be improved up with something like:
"This post requires staff attention for another reason not listed above, such as flagging the topic for deletion. "
We’ve been online for less than a week, and like all communities, there will be an adjustment period. Before we paint all Silicon Valley apps as being ton deaf, let’s keep our progress positive and work together to improve on what we have.
Related to this, Discourse does allow users to “mute” whole threads. That way, if one has gone completely off-rails from a particular reader’s point of view, or the discussion isn’t useful to them, they’ll no longer be notified of any posts to that thread.
To mute a thread, go to the bottom of the thread and (just above Suggested Topics) toggle the current state from your default (Watching, Tracking, or Normal) to Muted.
In my defense, I deal with really agreggious UIs every day. I’m ragging here on Discourse, which I assume is not brand new web software. I think the Delete situation is completely messed up. And it should be taken to them.
There’s Delete button. It should just Delete, even if that is something that doesn’t happen immediately. It would be even worse to remove the Delete button I think. If Khronos is a paid customer of Discourse, I think it would be best to open up a support ticket to get the feature fixed (in future Discourse updates.)
@khronos On the topic of hidden nested replies… I think I’ve observed that the replies actually appear in multiple places. Which is strange in itself. But I understand better now. There is a chronological listing, that is not hidden. And then they are duplicated in the nested, collapsed menu.
It’s strange at first glance. But if this is how it works, I can see now why the collapsed menu is de/unaccentuated.
Khronos is not a paid customer of Discourse. We are using the self hosted Open Source Version.
I think understand your complaint better now. It isn’t that users can’t delete their own topics, it is that the delete button doesn’t do what you expect from a delete button. A valid solution might be that when the delete button is clicked, a popup appears with text along the lines of “Please explain why this topic should be deleted”, and the topic would then be flagged for the moderators.
Yes, the message sent to moderators should include a standard Delete operation message. Whether paid or not, the Discourse user community would benefit from a sane Delete feature. It’s a little weird something like that was implemented that way to begin with, moreover not encountered (until only now.)
It has been encountered and there is a fair amount of discussion around it. Being open source, often these changes are up to someone implement and pushing a request into the repository for review. That hasn’t happened yet.
